This high-powered and interactive presentation shows what can be done with hybrid integration and the power of Azure services. The topics covered include Microsoft BizTalk on-premises, Microsoft Azure Logic Apps, and API Management. Jon’s experience as a Microsoft integration partner, and now at Microsoft HQ, enables him to deliver both great demos and interesting real-life stories from the field.
Logic Apps can integrate with “anything” (APIs) and solve small or complex problems. Automation in a secure and reliable environment fast and easy.
Connect Anything:
On-premises, hybrid and cloud
Mission critical, complex integration scenarios
Business productivity
Agile Business:
Quickly create workflows
Position to the future API centric
Transform Business:
Extract value from both (on-premises and cloud apps)
Build Holistic integration solutions.
“Pinnacle of PaaS compute”
Not just hardware “servers”, but software servers are also managed for you
Focus on business logic, not solving technical problems not core to business
Lower effort to get started makes it easier to experiment (bots, etc.)
Lets talk about what really makes up MSFT’s Serverless platform: At the center of the Serverless platform, is our compute offerings: Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps. Azure Functions is an event based Serverless compute experience that helps you accelerate your development. Logic Apps is a powerful workflow and orchestration tool. It enables building a Serverless app in minutes – by orchestrating multiple functions using a visual workflow tool.
Say you have your apps up and running using Serverless. Congratulations! You now need to collect intelligence from different apps across platforms to take actions upon. There are a few essential components which we think are core to building Serverless applications are:
Data/ Storage –Functions has triggers and bindings with Azure document DB and Azure Blob storage
** Triggers: Triggers are event responses used to trigger your custom code. They allow you to respond to events across the Azure platform or on premise.
** Bindings: Bindings represent the necessary meta data used to connect your code to the desired trigger or associated input or output data.
Messaging such as queues and topics using Azure Service Bus and Azure Event Hubs
Integration – that includes core LOB apps and SaaS apps integration via Azure Logic Apps.
Intelligence on data and sentiment/ predictive analysis using Cognitive services and Machine learning
Conversation as a service – how do we equip developers to build apps that offer an end-to-end experience for their end users – Azure Bot Service offers a Serverless interactive bot experience.
More, developers are spending more time writing code that allows them to add huge business impact with Serverless. MSFT offers numerous development tools such as IDE Support for Visual Studio in functions and Logic Apps, enables local development (vs web browser coding environment), visual debugging capability, all with your tools of choice.
Lastly, I also want to highlight top scenarios and use cases for Serverless:
Real-time Stream analytics: Customers can use Functions to feed real-time streams of data from application tracking into structured data and store it in SQL online.
SaaS event processing: Customers can use Functions and Logic Apps to analyze data from an excel file in Onedrive and perform validation, filtration, sorting and convert data into consumable business charts
Web app architecture: Used a lot in creating targeted marketing collaterals – when a customer clicks on a webpage, it triggers a webhook, that uses a function to create an ad that matches the customer profile and displays a completed webpage.
Real-time bot messaging: When customers send a message to a chatbox, Functions calls Cortana analytics to generate appropriate answers and sends a response back.
//from before: Customers have different paths to build a Serverless app – start by building the distributed application components using functions by leveraging the numerous templates and declarative bindings Or
Start with the workflow and orchestration of Serverless application using Azure Logic Apps. The visual designer enables developers to quickly and easily author, edit and visualize orchestration of multiple functions and workflow.
Case study: https://customers.microsoft.com/de-de/story/fujifilm-software-co-ltd
Stat: Development time cut by 75 percent
Task
The decade that brought increasing success for IMAGE WORKS also brought increasing challenges. While its technology had been state-of-the-art 10 years earlier, the legacy technology behind the on-premises, self-hosted solution was unfamiliar to new engineers and hampered efficient development. Customers requested new features at a frequency that was difficult to meet. The volume of image files soared to 1 terrabyte (TB) per day, and the amount of corresponding metadata increased to 10 million objects. As these numbers increased, so did system latency. The way that customers could use metadata in workflows was a competitive advantage for IMAGE WORKS, but now that metadata was slowing the system’s responsiveness to customers.
Before Serverless
Earlier way to build this system was using VMs, but FUJIFILM executives had discounted an on-premises expansion because of the potential time and cost.
Using Serverless
FUJIFILM’s use of Azure App Service and the ability to develop the new IMAGE WORKS in separate service units and then connect them with Azure Functions helped to speed development.
The company also used Azure Functions to implement microservices, which boost stability for service delivery. That’s because, with microservices, FUJIFILM avoids suspension of its broader service when a single microservice fails or is taken offline for scheduled maintenance. The company had traditionally used waterfall development, but these Azure features supported FUJIFLM’s adoption of agile development for IMAGE WORKS. The move from waterfall to agile cut development time for new functions by 75 percent.